Block Aircraft Registration Request (BARR)

NBAA President and CEO Ed Bolen warned the nation's aircraft owners and pilots
that proposed limitations to the Block Aircraft Registration Request (BARR) program
were "dangerous, invasive and anti-competitive." Bolen was interviewed on AOPA Live, the
streaming video channel of the 400,000+ member Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association
(AOPA).

The BARR program was established by Congress to protect privacy, security and
competitiveness of companies, and allows real-time radar flight data on specific aircraft
to be blocked from public view. A new proposal from the Federal Aviation Administration,
recently published in the Federal Register, calls for identifier blocking only for a "valid
security concern." NBAA calls the new proposal "fundamentally inconsistent with
government's long-established obligation to protect privacy, not to compromise it."

"This is a very slippery slope," Bolen told AOPA Executive Producer Warren Morningstar.
"We [provide information] to our federal government and we expect it to be protected. [For
the government] to turn around and broadcast that information to unknown parties, against
the person's will, facilitates electronic stalking." The full interview is available on AOPA's Web site.

Bolen compared the expectation of privacy for a business aircraft to that of a motorist using
an electronic E-ZPass payment card at a toll booth on an Interstate Highway; in both modes
of transportation, citizens expect that the government will protect privacy, not look to
emerging technologies to facilitate an intrusion.

In the nine-minute AOPA Live interview, Bolen detailed reasons why a company might not
want everyone to know all about its business flights. "[They fly] to see customers, clients,
potential merger partners, and they don't want that broadcast to their competitors," he
said. "There may be security concerns, too, where businesses know of people who would do
them harm and they don't want [the government] to broadcast their movements."

NBAA will soon be filing comments opposing the new limitations to the BARR program, and
the Association is urging NBAA Members to do likewise, communicating their own concerns
with the proposal. Comments may be submitted for Docket FAA-2011-0183 through the
government regulations comment web site, by mail or by fax. The deadline for comments is
April 4, 2011.